


Rate of Change of Position

by handschuhmaus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 21:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17691311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: the brief escapades of a force-user on the run, and a spoiled kid





	Rate of Change of Position

**Author's Note:**

  * For [miz-blue](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=miz-blue).



> ...somehow this is «influenced by notbecauseofvictories' Et in Arcadia Ego» take two?
> 
> it's not in the dent-de-lioun verse at all.

i.

it's the...acceleration, technically, the acceleration, that he loves, whipping around corners. 

and curves, curves that physics programs say are also acceleration, just change of direction rather than of speed.

physics could also tell, given a host of variables, exactly how long one has to stop upon seeing (or sensing) someone stepping into one's path. The answer in this case won't be favorable. The Force might enhance reaction times, but it's physics that governs whether the stop can be made.

total: two pedestrians with lacerations, broken bones, internal bleeding, and some scuffs to the bumper of Cosinga Palpatine's new speeder.

ii.

there's a ribald Corellean song asking whaada we do with a drunken spacer. Nobody asked (or answered) the question of what to do with a Jedi who no longer is one.

Dooku is trying to rent a speeder. Being a Jedi, new-minted, who is no longer a Jedi means he doesn't have any ID, nor credit; he stowed away to the Midrim, anywhere that wasn't Serenno, home that wasn't a home. He is not a criminal by nature, but Jedi skills don't transfer well to civilian life. They aren't intended to.

"Do you need a ride?" the kid in the fancy speeder asks.

Dooku frowns, but accepts. "Anywhere," he says, on where he wants to go.

iii.

Palpatine (who rejected his first name) keeps driving and keeps driving, along one of the speeder lanes kept clear of trees but sadly lacking in curves, for hours on end. The air in the vehicle is thick with the remnants of adrenaline and the desperate need to flee, even now. They skirt a city, head for the region where he hasn't been (the Jedi hasn't been anywhere here), the fuzz of distant old fashioned radio music on the stereo. 

"What are you running from?" Dooku asks, when mountains loom in the foreground and they slow going up a long steep hill.

"My father," says the kid, and doesn't elaborate, only bears down on the accelerator, hears the engine whine at this demand.

Dooku doesn't offer any answers either, even though he is asked no questions.

iv.

Past the mountains they enter the foothills, threaded with rivers and fencerows, and the air gets a little chillier. Palpatine indicates a flimsi map, typically for emergencies or those on walking expeditions, lest they be tracked, and Dooku reads it, unfamiliar names posing some difficult, until he sees that they are nearly in the last town before a great sea. 

"Dinner?" Palpatine asks, when they have slowed and entered the town square. 

"I— haven't got any credits," Dooku admits, and wonders at his secret fact that he was born to aristocracy on Serenno, but has no skills to provide for himself at just any odd place in the galaxy.

But they have a conspiratorial air, one for both, both for one, and spend the end of Palpatine's spending allowance on street fare.

There is no inn, and Dooku isn't about to con his way into a room anyway. Palpatine drives past town, entering a coastal park.

v. 

"We can't escape civilization, can we? Not here." _civilization_ is a foul word on Dooku's tongue, representing as it presently does every expectation that he continue being a Jedi.

"Well—no," and Palpatine sinks, in his fine garments, further into the bed of loam and leaves under the oak, only dimly outlined in the twilight.

The cool spring night is settling over them, and Dooku casts a cautious eye at the speeder before flinging himself down and nestling in the leaves back to back with the boy. Palpatine takes his hand, and that touch feels more like friendship than ten years with Yoda. They spread his unworn Jedi cloak, unfolding it, over them, and grab at leaves and fallen pine branches for further insulation.

vi. 

dawn is grim when it brings no hope of breakfast, and the air of a hanging. Dew coats the leaves above them, but Dooku's mouth is dry as cotton.

birds sing a chorus in the dim light, and Palpatine's belly emits a hungry growl, only for its owner to shrug. "Not the first time I've had to miss a meal." 

all is interrupted by the sound of a siren turned on and then off after a single wail. A civic enforcer, a policeman exits the speeder, along with a Jedi Master whom Dooku doesn't know. 

"Hands over your head," he barks, and Dooku obeys, stiff from the cold. More slowly, Palpatine complies as well, a grim set to his mouth. 

"You don't get to run," the unfamiliar Jedi informs Dooku, as handcuffs click around the wrists of his recent friend. Before he can quite process what is happening, a needle sinks into his shoulder, and the world turns black.

vii. (many years later)

the denizen of the Coruscant underworld tunelessly hums a song from a popular musical, even as Jedi Master Dooku approaches him. _I am reaching, but I fall. And the night is closing in..._

What they said they did to Revan, what they did to him, pupil of Yoda himself, was still not enough. Oh, not that he, Yan Dooku, had memories of before. But he always had to prove that he was not...something he didn't even know. Even so, the graying red hair, the friendly face, look a little familiar.

"Have you seen this man?" Dooku says perfunctorily, pulls up a holo of a bounty hunter suspected of kidnapping a senator's child. "What is your name?"

The underworlder smiles, grim, laughs mirthlessly, and says in the cultured tones of Naboo, "I haven't got one." He looks away before saying "And I haven't seen him, Jedi Dooku."

As he walks away without permission, he sings another snatch of musical theater under his breath, "And must I now begin to doubt, who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone and still it trembles. The world— you have known is lost in shadow!"

**Author's Note:**

> ...I'm probably going to also give this concept (of Dooku leaving WAY earlier) a different treatment later, if my muse will cooperate...


End file.
